Adeline huffed. “I hate it when innocent people become collateral damage.”
“Clearly, we need to find this professor and ask him some questions,” Jack said.
“Assuming he’s still alive.” Saul gave Jack a pointed look. “If he stepped on Muntz’s toes, he might’ve ended up in the same state as Marlene.”
Jack shrugged. “Either way, it’s another lead on finding Muntz.”
They broke out of their huddle, and Jack strode back over to the provost’s desk. “Can you give us this professor’s name and address?”
“Certainly. I’ll write the address down for you.” Banning grabbed a fountain pen from its glass paperweight holder and scrawled the address on a yellow sticky note. Offering the note to Jack, he added, “As for the name, it’s Reiz. Tanner Reiz.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tanner
The Connecticut River spit Tanner out the way a cat hawked up a hairball. He washed up on the bank covered in slimy mud, soaked to the bone and half drowned by cloudy water that was probably contaminated with flesh-eating bacteria. Too weak to stand, much less walk, he crawled up the bank on his hands and knees, until he reached a patch of grass that hadn’t yet been swamped by the rising tide. There he lay for an indeterminate period of time, coughing up water and gasping in air and groaning at his myriad aches and pains.
Strong winds carried bands of heavy rain across the city, and Tanner reveled in the feeling of the downpour washing away the thick muck that clung to his skin. Blood weeping from his many cuts and scrapes washed away with it, and the cold temperature of the rain numbed his open wounds. It was the most refreshing shower he’d had in his entire life.
Sharp lightning arced across the sky and struck the river somewhere miles away. The resulting peal of thunder was so strong that it rocked Tanner’s bones. Normally, he would’ve taken a strike like that as a warning to rush indoors, but he felt no such urgency right now.
The sable wight had sucked all the fear out of his mind, along with the energy from his soul.
When he no longer felt like he was being waterboarded, he finally pushed himself up into a sitting position. His head spun at first, the world tilting side to side, so he waited for the dizziness to ebb before attempting to stand. Weary and woozy, he almost tipped backward as he rose, almost tumbled into the river again. But he regained his balance in the nick of time, breathed a sigh of relief, and took a look around.
The Karthen Street Bridge was out of sight, hidden behind a bend half a mile upriver. Fifty yards or so to Tanner’s left lay a maze of docks that stretched out over the water. Boats of various sizes and shapes were moored here and there. Small commercial fishing boats made up the bulk of their number, and the few personal pleasure craft among them were also outfitted for fishing excursions.
Weatherford’s slice of the fishing industry was not large or particularly profitable, but nevertheless, the fishermen persisted. Even now, as Tanner stood there in the middle of a raging storm, a five-man crew hopped on board their boat and set off across the choppy water to parts unknown.
Perhaps they’d come back with a nice catch. Perhaps they’d capsize and drown in the angry water. Or perhaps their boat would be swallowed whole by a preternatural sea creature that lived in the river’s murky depths.
No outcome, even the most outlandish, would surprise him today.
Tanner dug his wallet out of his coat pocket, stuck it in his pants pocket, and then shrugged off the coat. The tan fabric was irreparably stained by a variety of interesting fluids, and the rain had made the thick coat three times heavier than normal, so there was no point in dragging it along with him.
He balled it up and tossed it aside. Whether it landed in the tall grass or the churning water, he did not care. Nor did he care that he was littering, and that littering carried a hefty fine in Weatherford.
They can send me a goddamn bill, he thought as he slogged up the riverbank.
Here, the bank had a shallow incline. If Tanner had been in good shape, he could’ve happily skipped right up to the top. As it was, he staggered to the top hunched over and winded. He had to pause for a moment to catch his breath and wait for his legs to stop quaking before he continued toward what he saw was an industrial area. An active industrial area.
The factories here were not abandoned buildings haunted by terrifying creatures. They were functioning businesses staffed with humans that operated during regular hours. Three factories, all of them seafood processors, lay within a quarter mile of Tanner’s location.
Beyond the factories was a highway choked with cars. The storm had slowed rush-hour traffic to a crawl. Beneath the roar of the wind and rain, Tanner heard a chorus of impatient horn beeps.
A welcome sense of normality settled atop Tanner’s shoulders, and he finally relaxed.
He’d lost the sable wight somewhere in the river, and the current had carried him away from Benton Court. He was on the wrong side of the river still, but there was another bridge not far from here. All he had to do was reach the street and find a bus stop. He had a public transport card loaded with enough funds to take him anywhere in the city that he wanted to go.
I’ll get off at the stop for the nearest hospital, he thought. Simple.
Or, well, it would have been simple. If Tanner had not found every direct route to the street blocked by a fence or a wall of some kind.
All the factory sites were bordered by a continuous sprawl of chain-link fencing that had partitions for each lot. A cinderblock wall slightly too tall for Tanner to climb separated the factory to the left from the bait and tackle shop that abutted the labyrinth of docks. And to the right was a retaining wall that dropped off into the foundation area of a construction site.
Tanner spent several minutes debating how to proceed before a light caught his eye. A little blue flicker barely visible through the heavy sheets of rain. It hovered in place just above the top of the retaining wall, like it had always been there. But Tanner was sure it hadn’t been there a minute ago.
Was there someone working at the construction site despite the inclement weather? If so, perhaps Tanner could ask them for safe passage through the site so he could reach the street.
That pleasant thought in mind, he set off for the light. But when he was five steps away from it, the light disappeared.
Perplexed, Tanner peered down into the deep pit of the foundation—and spotted the light again. It was now at the bottom of the metal ladder that ran down the back side of the retaining wall.
Without the curtain of rain in the way, Tanner could see that the light wasn’t part of a fixture or flashlight but was actually a free-standing light source. A small lick of floating blue fire whose curling tip flickered at the touch of rain.
Tanner suddenly understood. The light is some sort of preternatural phenomenon.
At that realization, another one of those revenant memories came to him. It identified the blue fire as a “will-o’-the-wisp.” A ghost light.
In his college years, Tanner had studied numerous myths that contained will-o’-the-wisps, and, he’d believed, the mundane historical contexts behind those myths. However, his newly acquired memory about the phenomenon contradicted all those ordinary explanations.
In the memory, Tanner—or rather, a middle-aged man who had once possessed the same soul Tanner now did—explained to a young boy that will-o’-the-wisps were elemental spirits that appeared to people in times of confusion or distress and led them to places that the wisps felt were important for those people to go.
If that memory was true, then the wisp at the bottom of the ladder was trying to get Tanner to follow it somewhere. His immediate response to that was a thousand repetitions of no. A knee-jerk reaction based on his other recent experiences with the preternatural.
After that feeling abated, he considered the situation more rationally. No sense of alarm about will-o’-the-wisps had welled up from his stack of foreign memories, and unlike the sable wight, the little blue light didn’t seem to
be hostile. It just hovered there, waiting patiently.
Oh, screw it. The other options are worse, and I’m tired of standing in the rain.
He descended the ladder, nearly slipping off the wet rungs twice, and dropped the last few feet to the bottom, where someone had laid out a makeshift sidewalk of plywood boards. Turning to face the expanse of the construction site, Tanner found the wisp had moved yet again. Now it hovered next to a stack of steel beams waiting to be placed into the array of deep holes a large piece of equipment had gouged into the earth.
It was raining so hard that those holes were overflowing with water. Which made Tanner feel marginally better. Because it meant he couldn’t fall into them and break his neck.
Staying near the center of the boards, Tanner set off across the construction site. The wisp led him on a winding path that avoided the most perilous areas, including a few dangers hidden from a distance that Tanner would have definitely stumbled into without a guide. Eventually, he reached the opposite side of the foundation pit, no worse for wear.
A ladder that led up to street level waited for him along the earthen wall, and the wisp floated at the top of the ladder. Tanner carefully ascended the ladder, wiping off each wet rung with his shirtsleeve for better traction. Grabbing the last rung, he poked his head over the edge of the pit, searching for the wisp again. He spotted it loitering in a place that didn’t make much sense.
He’d thought the wisp would lead him to a bus stop or some sort of shelter from the rain. But the end of the construction site lay directly across from the edge of the pit, the adjoining street a hop and a skip away. Yet the wisp had positioned itself next to a tall stack of pallets covered with plastic sheeting.
Voices, barely audible through the rain, emanated from the other side of the pallets.
Tanner looked from the pallets to the temporary fencing with a convenient stack of two-by-fours set out before it like a makeshift staircase, and wondered if he should ignore the wisp’s suggestion. But the people on the other side of the pallets could be construction workers. If they saw a trespasser scaling the fence, they might call the cops on him.
After everything that had happened to him so far today, Tanner did not want to end up in handcuffs with a pending misdemeanor charge. Better to approach the workers in a friendly manner, he figured, and pretend he’d fallen into the pit by accident.
That way, they’d worry they were liable to be sued and go out of their way to treat him well.
Not wanting to walk in at an awkward moment, Tanner crept up to the pallets, the squelching of his shoes in the mud muffled by the heavy rain. When he drew close to the stack, the little blue light winked out. This time, it didn’t reappear. It had brought Tanner to the location it thought he should be.
Tanner found it odd that the wisp had deposited him on the opposite side of the pallets from the people. Almost like it wanted him to eavesdrop.
Dread rolled through Tanner’s gut. He paused three steps from a small gap between the pallet stacks that would let him peer across to the other side. What if the wisp wasn’t leading me to safety? What if it was leading me to something it believed was imperative for me to witness? Something dangerous?
Alarmed, he almost turned tail and rushed to the fence, but then a long string of swears in fluent French reached his ears. Something about the man’s tone of voice struck him as familiar. Curiosity got the better of him—a quick peek couldn’t hurt, right?—and he slunk over to the gap.
On the other side of the pallets sat a double-wide trailer. In front of the double-wide trailer sat two trucks.
The truck on the left was an unmarked delivery truck, the rolling door at the back drawn up. A rectangular wooden crate was the truck’s only cargo.
The truck on the right was a blue pickup truck with its tailgate down. There was nothing on the bed of that truck, other than a few puddles of water and an unkempt pile of ratchet tie-down straps.
A group of four men were busy heaving the wooden crate out of the delivery truck via a rickety ramp that looked ready to snap. Across from these men, waiting near the pickup, were a man in a long black coat and a woman in a yellow raincoat with the hood pulled up.
The man in the black coat was the potty mouth, and he continued to curse as he shielded his phone from the rain and tapped away at the screen. The woman impatiently ground her boot into the mud and occasionally shot glances between the men on the ramp and the busy street just beyond the fence.
Only a sagging orange tarp shielded the scene at the construction site from public view. Judging by the tightness in the woman’s shoulders, that thin veil of privacy displeased her. She was concerned that someone would see what they were doing.
Clearly, she was right to be concerned. Because hapless literature professor Tanner Reiz, of all people, had stumbled upon this obviously illegal exchange of goods. And if the bald man with the crowbar tucked into his belt decided to pry the crate open, he might find out just what criminal cargo these people had shipped in from who knew where.
The question, in Tanner’s mind, was not whether he wanted to know that information. He was a scholar, and scholars wanted to know everything. Especially the salacious secrets that other people didn’t want them to know.
No, the question was whether or not acquiring that information would put Tanner’s life at risk.
Considering that he’d been abducted by three obvious career criminals and nearly been eaten by a hideous soul-sucking monster—which could very well happen again if Muntz found out he’d survived—he thought that his life couldn’t be any more at risk unless he climbed onto the roof of a building, held up a lightning rod, and dared the storm to strike him down.
Also, he pointed out to himself, if I climb the fence, they’ll see me, and something tells me these aren’t the sort of people I want to be seen by.
It was decided. He’d wait for these people to leave the construction site first, and once they were too far off to spot him, he’d make his own getaway. And if he happened to catch a glimpse of some illegal drugs or stolen jewels or pilfered archeological artifacts while he was waiting for these people to leave?
Well, Tanner wasn’t a snitch. So no harm, no foul, right?
Chapter Sixteen
Saul
Thirty seconds of shock passed after Banning said those words—Tanner Reiz—before Saul took off at full speed, flying down the stairs and out the front door. He threw up all over the front steps and staggered to the team’s car, sinking to his knees and slumping against the back bumper.
Panic danced through his bones. Horror roiled in his gut. Guilt wrapped its hand around his throat and squeezed. His breaths came and went so fast that he nearly passed out, face and fingers tingling, and the only thing that kept him anchored to the waking world was the cold touch of the pouring rain.
As this initial panic waned, a dull sense of shock washed through his veins. The shock of learning that the mistakes he’d made in adolescence had finally come back to haunt him. The shock of realizing that what happened to Marlene Witherspoon was partially his fault.
Her death might not have been on his hands, but it was within his sphere of influence.
Muntz killed her because of me, Saul lamented, and he’s going to kill Tanner too. If he hasn’t already…
Saul tangled his hands in his hair and pulled until it hurt. “Oh god, Tanner…”
Someone slowly approached him from behind, and a gentle hand grasped his shoulder. “Saul,” Jack said, “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
“Muntz took him,” Saul murmured. “He took Tanner.”
“And Tanner is…?”
“My brother.”
“I thought you’d cut off all contact with your brother, along with your parents. So why did your brother move to Weatherford? Did you recently reconnect?”
“No! I didn’t know he was here. I didn’t even know he was on the East Coast. If I’d known, I would’ve…I would’ve…”
Jack crouched
beside him so they could meet eye to eye. “You need to help me understand. If Tanner was never in your presence somewhere Muntz could’ve seen the two of you together, then how would he have known you had a brother to kidnap in the first place? Your family connections aren’t public information. The PTAD scrubs all of that off the internet, off government databases, off everything, in order to keep family members safe from these exact kinds of threats.”
Saul stared at him dejectedly. “You never looked into my family, did you?”
“No, I don’t like snooping around in things my teammates prefer remain private. I respected your desire to leave your family in the past. Why?”
“There’s something I never told you.” He swallowed, throat dry as sand despite all the rain. “About Tanner.”
“You never told me much of anything about Tanner,” Jack pointed out. “I didn’t even know his name until just now.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Saul raked his fingers down his face. “I never told you what kind of brother Tanner is.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s not my younger brother, or my older brother.” Saul bit his tongue until he tasted blood. “He’s my twin, Jack. My identical twin.”
Jack reared back. “What?”
Saul bit back a sob. “He’s my twin. We look exactly the same.”
“Good god,” Jack muttered. “Muntz meant to abduct you.”
“And he got Tanner by mistake.”
Jack pressed his fist to his mouth, thinking hard. Then his hazel eyes flickered yellow, the sign of an adrenaline rush fueled by the lycanthropy virus that ran through his blood. He peered over Saul’s head, and Saul followed his gaze. Adeline and Jill were waiting on the sidewalk, huddled beneath a single small umbrella.
“The vision,” Jack said softly. “The vision Jill had of ‘you’ fearfully running from the manticore. You, a man who pretends he isn’t scared of anything, even in the face of imminent death.”
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 13
